Art often imitates life. In searching for stories and ideas, they often come from real life. Real people, events, situations, whether from the author’s life or from others’ experiences, make excellent soil to plant story seeds in. Sometimes the real story is told through the lens of fiction with fictional names for people and places (known as a roman à clef, or novel with a key; film à clef for movies), which allows for stretching of truth a little more. Yet this calls into question how close to the truth should a writer stick. What’s more, how will the people upon whom characters are based react?
If characters are not composites but primarily based upon specific individuals, there is a risk they might not like how they are portrayed, especially if it is in a negative light (such as caricatures, a technique used by a fictional writer in the mystery shows Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders who wasn’t a good person). Ernest Hemingway has been accused of antisemitism due to the character Robert Cohn, based on his contemporary Harold Loeb, in his roman à clef, The Sun Also Rises. As revealed in Ken Burns’s program, Hemingway used people’s real names in his first drafts, but he changed them so as not to be sued.
If people’s real names are used, even if it’s just the first name, the risk is even greater that they will be forever associated with the fictional versions. It was true for Peter Llewellyn Davies, Alice Liddell, and Christopher Robin Milne. Even aliases in nonfiction/memoir can be viewed negatively, as it was with Donald Sinclair and the family of Fritz Pfeffer, respectively, over “Siegfried Farnon” and “Albert Dussel” in All Creatures Great and Small and The Diary of Anne Frank, or if unflattering names are used for fictional characters.
Then, of course, it’s not just themselves but those they care about, and trying to say counterparts aren’t the real people may not matter. William Randolph Hearst not only disliked that his life was the main inspiration for Citizen Kane, but he also hated how the counterparts to his mistress Marion Davies and his mother were depicted. He used his influence to sabotage the film’s box office success.
Of course, when telling a fictional narrative with fictional names, one can always claim plausible deniability. Plus, hopefully most people won’t mind, especially if the writer is on good terms with them. Nevertheless, it is always something to bear in mind when fiction is drawn from reality. There is a boundary regarding fact vs. fiction, and it should be taken into account when crossing it.
Andrew McDowell 